* Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory: Bruno Latour (Oxford University Press, 2005).
"Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the
world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the
'social'.
Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social' as used
by Social Scientists has become laden with assumptions to the point
where it has become a misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a
phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stabilized state of affairs, a
bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another
phenomenon. Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type
of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or
'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled
together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the
nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two
distinct things: a process of assembling: and a type of material,
distinct from others.
Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought
of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a
'social explanation' of other states of affairs. While these attempts
have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very
success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so.
At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise
constituents entering the social domain.
Latour returns to the original
meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion and allow it to trace
connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional
goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on
his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds
it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is
assembled under the umbrella of Society.
This approach, a 'sociology of
associations' has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book
is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand
Actor-Network-Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential
proponents."
"Everyone
seems to know with what sort of forces and in which sort of materials
the social world is made. I have always been struck, on the contrary,
by the huge gap between the vast variety of attachments with which
people elaborate their different worlds and the limited repertoire we
possess in social science to account for them. I found this gap
widening even more when I began, thirty years ago, to provide a social
explanation of scientific practice. While most people said such an
enterprise was clearly non sense; while some of my close colleagues
claimed it was, if not easy, at least feasible within the normal limits
of the humans sciences, a few friends and I decided to take the
enormous difficulties of this task as the occasion to rethink the
notions of society and of social explanation. Starting from the new
insights of science studies, we have since explored many other domains
from technology to health, from market organisations to art, from
religion to law, from management to politics. This alternative way of
practicing sociology has been called Actor-Network-Theory or ANT.
Although it has been widely used, it has also been largely
misunderstood — in part because of the ambiguity of the word ‘social’.
To clarify those misunderstandings, I thought useful to write an
introduction to this small school of thought — or rather to propose my
own version of it. In this book I show why sociology may be construed
as the science of associations and not only as the science of the
social. This reformulation of what is meant by the two terms of
‘science’ and ‘society’ will lead us to revisit several neglected
traditions, especially that of Gabriel Tarde. In this book, readers
will be offered a different way to fulfil the three duties of
sociology: how to deploy the controversies about the social world; how
to retrace the means through which they are stabilized; and, finally,
how to gain some political relevance."
Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations (accesible en formato html)
Las razones de la hormiga - Una fantasía inspirada por el libro “Reassembling the Social” de Bruno Latour:
Doubty (reseña accesible en formato html -muy recomendable-)
ciao!
